Monday, 20 August 2012

Teaching has become a kind of competition for children wherein everyone
is trying to outrun the other. But they do not understand that this learning
will not help them in practical world. What we need is a sound educational
mechanism with innovative techniques instead of grading systems to make students
independent and self-reliant.

Through this write-up; I don’t want to
create any controversy or any heated discussion about the present education
system. But normally all my blogs have concentrated on providing something
different so that tutors as well as children can have interesting ways of
thinking. This blog is going to reflect different ways through which grading
systems have affected the children as a whole. Now traditional tutors will
argue at this point and say that without grading systems it is impossible to
evaluate the progress of a child. Now maybe they have a valid point. In fact
today in the morning, I replied to a facebook post about an image that I had
kept on Facebook. Now it was a very simple quote but yielded lot of attention
from various sections of public at large. Let me share the experience with you
and believe me this is all connected to the subject that I am discussing right
now.

The quote read as: “The flaw in the
education system, as far as I see it, is that you live your life - the teacher
and student – in quest of A’s. Yet later in life, the A is irrelevant.” Now
this quote is from Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist. So this is not my
quote but since I posted it on Facebook there were lot of reactions on it. I
will not take the names of the users because of the privacy issue but it was
quite interesting and debatable topic. There were certain people who were of
the opinion that technology has developed so much that internet has become a
new medium for education and there is no way to substitute that with the grading
system. Now this is the view of one of the users. While others were of the
opinion that if we drop this yardstick of evaluating children and substitute
them with social media tools it would become very difficult to make students
study through conventional methods like books. While others quoted that if you
only make children learn and re-learn to gain knowledge there would be no
yardstick to judge their skills.

I defer from this opinion. I have
already enumerated in that particular discussion that if a child does not find
a thing interesting he/she would not be involved in the studies thoroughly. The
current teaching mechanism has its own flaws which need to be overcome only
through making education fun-loving for children. If you give provide guidance
and introduce creative ways of teaching students in a way that they love it
they would no longer need an evaluation
method or a grading system. It will all be just a mandatory provision just
for the sake of it. This very idea makes me very interested in developing such
a concept in the current education system. I have already written quite a few
blogs on innovative teaching methods for math and English. Let me give you the
links for the same. Copy and paste these links to a separate browser to have a
quick overlook on what I presume about the way education should be for
children:

So once you have been through these blogs you
will appreciate my idea of creating a knowledge based education system which
should let children decide their own evaluation. The idea would be to give
creative end of the chapter activities for children especially for online
tutors. Now the only reason for giving preference to online tutors is that they normally
do not get the chance to have much interaction with children and need to
provide something creative in order for the parents and children to enroll for
their course. There is lot of competition in this field and there is no
respite. Hence; I am highlighting these points from the perspective of online
tutors.

Now, we don’t want our future generation to
be people who get straight A’s in their schools and colleges but are duds as
far as practical exposure is concerned. The idea is to integrate practical
components early on in the studies in such a way that theory and practical
approaches both get equal importance. The primary objective should be to
provide knowledge to the children in the best possible creative manner. Now by
being creative I mean being different. Use different teaching techniques for
different children as no two children have the same grasping power. This has
already been discussed in my previous blogs. But it is very important to
enumerate this point for this subject. If you look at the end of the chapter
activities blog you will find that I have never focused on the grading system
because only grades do not reflect the intellectuality of the child. A child
can have an exam-fever because of which he/she may not be able to provide
adequate answers; but if you ask them to provide the answers without mentioning
the word test or exam they do excellent in it. Hence; knowledge is bliss; and
it should not be confused with evaluating methods. These methods were created
to instill competition amongst children. But do we still need the same ideology
after hundreds of years.

Traditional teachers would now argue that
without evaluation methods it will become very difficult to gauge the progress
of the child. But who says that we do not need evaluation methods? The only
thing is that the word exam/test should change to activities. Now we should
have different creative activities which encourage the child to showcase their hidden
talents. Knowledge can only be delivered if the child is ready to accept it.

You might have heard the phrase:

“You can take the horse to the pond but
cannot make him drink it.”

In the
same ways if you do not understand what a child wants you cannot provide
knowledge to him/her. It is a difficult proposition even for God to make them
understand anything if they are not in the mood to study. Hence, there is a
need to change the evaluation
techniques and make it easier and comfortable for children. It should be
more like an activity than an evaluation exercise. Hence, I said in the
beginning that grading system
has actually impacted the children in a very negative way. Now they are
carrying loads of books in schools, are involved in lots of activities and are way
too tired to solve your quizzes and boring tests. Hence; I call all the tutors
and teachers to contribute further; and share your knowledge about innovative teaching techniques
by contributing something innovative and different from what has been taught
since traditions. We are looking at the 21st Century education
hence we should be different. Our thoughts should be innovative and
path-breaking so that we can pave way for a bright future for the approaching
generations.

I know you would say that we are back to
square one from where we started in this blog. But do you really think that
changes can be made in the current education paradigm in a single day or a
single thought? It is a gradual process.

I would like to end this blog by mentioning a
quote written by Eleanor Roosevelt,

“The future
belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

Hence; I want as many teachers and tutors to
participate in discussions related to this topic and comment on this blog as much
as possible. Remember we are doing this for the future generations to follow.
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